Modern computer applications are complex systems that may use multiple operating systems, have multiple program components and multiple types of users, each with unique access requirements. System Administrators face a difficult task when attempting to initialize and maintain application uptime and optimization for users. Troubleshooting and optimizing complex computer systems becomes exponentially more difficult as the size of the user base and complexity of their computer needs increases as each product could contain hundreds of configuration settings.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram depicting a typical prior art manual administration process. This manual administration process 130 begins with an administrator selecting a set of system behaviors 134 desired for capture and analysis in step 1 of the process. Once a set of system behaviors 134 has been identified, the administrator must then compile a list of data required for analysis 136 of the set of identified system behaviors 134 depicted as step 2. Step 3 of the process involves the collection of the data catalogued in the list of data required for analysis 136. This collection step requires manual examination of configuration data from a variety of sources depending upon the system behaviors 134 selected for analysis.
In this example, a first source for data can include local software applications 138 and their associated configuration data 140. This data could be accessed through the software application 138 or through data files external to the running application. Data required for analysis 136 could also be housed in one or more data repositories 142. These data repositories could be stored locally or remotely. Configuration data 148 also may be stored in remote software application instances or in remote data repositories and could be accessed remotely through servers 150. When all data appearing in the list of data required for analysis has been collected, the administrator must analyze the collected data and transform the data to a form useful for the administrator's needs at step 4 of the process. Finally, step 5 of the process entails display of the analyzed results 152.
A weakness of this method is that all tasks fall to the administrator and many of which are manually intensive. For example, as the number of integrated products grow and/or the number of configuration settings increases, the usefulness of this approach diminishes because of the increased complexity in analyzing multiple applications and components through this approach.